Used Hard Drives Are Gold Mines for Identity Theft

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With the amount of personal data many people keep on external
hard drives and USB sticks, one would hope they'd take care to
wipe these crucial devices clean before donating or selling
them. According to the United Kingdom's Information
Commissioner's Office, that's not the case at all.

In a
press release issued today (April 25), the ICO said that
of 200 hard drives, 20 memory sticks and 10 mobile phones bought
from auction sites or trade fairs two years ago, 48 percent of
them had not been wiped, and still contained some of their
original owners' information. Out of those "dirty drives," 11
percent of them contained personally identifiable information
that could be leveraged for identity theft or fraud.

In all, the computer forensics company hired by the ICO in its
2010 investigation recovered 34,000 files containing personal or
corporate information. At least two of the secondhand hard drives
contained scanned bank statements and passports and medical
details — "enough information to enable someone to seal the
former owner's identity," the ICO said in announcing the results
of the investigation.

On four other hard drives, the forensics team recovered financial
and health details about the employees of four organizations.

Information Commissioner Christopher Graham urged people to fully
erase their personal data from any removable hard drives. And
that means more than simply hitting "delete," he said.

"We live in a world where personal
and company information is a highly valuable commodity,"
Graham said. "It is important that people do everything they can
to stop their details from falling into the wrong hands."

"Many people will presume that pressing the delete button on a
computer file means that it is gone forever. However, this
information can be easily recovered," he added.

The ICO published a list of guidelines to help people
effectively wipe their hard drives ; tips include physical
destruction, secure deletion software, reformatting, sending a
drive to a specialist, and restoring a drive to its factory
settings.

Conducting a survey, the ICO found that 65 percent of people give
away their old cell phones, computers and laptops to others when
they're done with them. Forty-four percent of people give these
devices away for free.